Vanderbilt University learned this lesson the hard way when it attempted in 2002 to rename “Confederate Memorial Hall,” a building which it had acquired following a merger with George Peabody College for Teachers in 1979.

Peabody had received a donation of $50,000 from the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1933 to fund the building’s construction, with the condition that the building carry the moniker in perpetuity.

After Vanderbilt publicly announced that it would remove that tribute to the Confederacy from the building’s name and walls, the organization sued to enforce the terms of its gift agreement.

A decade later, anonymous donors gave Vanderbilt the $1.2 million it took to get rid of what Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos called “a symbol of exclusion, and a divisive contradiction of our hopes and dreams of being a truly great and inclusive university.”